


Operation Fish Or Cut Bait

by Merkwerkee



Series: Being Bruno Hamilton [30]
Category: Masters of the Metaverse
Genre: during his time in the Vietnam War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-23
Updated: 2020-02-23
Packaged: 2021-02-28 02:21:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,632
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22856164
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Merkwerkee/pseuds/Merkwerkee
Summary: Infiltrating a base accessible only via submarine is exactly as nerve-wracking as it sounds
Series: Being Bruno Hamilton [30]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1643020





	Operation Fish Or Cut Bait

Bruno kept his head bowed over his gun as he checked it over yet again.

Submarine operations were usually tense at best; this one brought a new level of stifling fatigue. The stealth submarine that was currently carrying them across the Black Sea ran with an absolute minimum of noise. Engines were muffled with a multitude of extra baffles, wooden utensils handed out instead of he usual cheap tin, and maintenance was kept to whatever they could get done quietly; they were deep in enemy territory here, and discovery would spell disaster for relations between the US and the USSR in addition to their own, grisly deaths.

The silence sat around Bruno, Weber, and the eight other guys that’d been assigned to the mission like a funeral pall. Cards were played in tense silence, conversations done in whispers, notes, or half-remembered sign language liberally sprinkled with military handsignals and general crudeness. The first guy who’d laughed too loudly that morning - PFC Marcus “Lizard” Doughty - had had the skipper of the submarine come down on his head like a ton of bricks; Bruno wouldn’t be surprised if the guy ended up scrubbing the head for the rest of their journey, the skipper’d been that pissed.

Nominally, the Marines in the sub were training for cold weather conditions somewhere in the asscrack of Alaska. Most of the unit actually was; those selected for the current mission had gone with the main group as far as Fort Hill before being split off and sent to the rendezvous point near Istanbul. Bruno wasn’t sure whether he was glad to be here instead of with the rest of the unit or not; teeth-freezing cold was starting to look preferable to spending another three days trapped in this tin can. Lieutenant Henry “Hacksaw” Woodbridge, in overall command of the mission, was a competent soldier with all the charming personality of a Glasgow kiss; Bruno himself wasn’t what you’d call a glowing socialite but at least he’d remembered to pack a deck of cards. Woodbridge spent the long hours alternating between pouring over what schematics Command had been able to provide them of their target and maps of the surrounding area, and having long, muttered conversations with himself that were always loud enough you knew what he was doing but quiet enough that you couldn’t make out what, exactly, he was saying.

A real charmer.

Still, whatever his personal quirks his performance in the field was beyond reproach and Bruno could deal with it. Usually. When not stuck on a tin can for three days with the man.

At least the rest of the assigned personnel were generally less grating. The commander of their tiny craft was a balding Commander William Hayes, a nervous older man who had the pallor of someone who spent too much time beneath the waves instead of above them and the antacid habit of a man who’d spent far too much time behind enemy lines. He knew every inch of his boat and could navigate her through the trickiest of waters, whatever his personal failings, and that was really all Bruno could ask for. The two pilots - Petty Officers Michael Montgomery and Lewis Burbank - were much better company, playing cards with the assembled marines whenever they were off-duty. Quietly, of course. The lone engineer - Lt. Cmdr. John Morrows - kept to himself, as much as anybody could on a tub this size, and never seemed to have much to say. Which, given the mission, was probably for the best.

Now, less than ten minutes away from the target, the tension in the sub was thick enough to cut with a knife. Bruno wasn’t the only one checking his weapon, and all packs of cards had been put away. Woodbridge was lurking near the foot of the ladder with PFCs Ferguson, Hubbard, Lawson, and Graham; clumped up around Bruno himself were Rowland, Estrada, Weber, and the unfortunate Doughty who still smelled faintly of cleaning chemicals. The overall mission, as Bruno understood it, was to go in and take out a listening post the Russians were trying to get operational for monitoring sub traffic on the Black Sea; Woodbridge’s team had the unenviable task of gaining access to the main operations hub and getting as much data about the Russian deployment as they could - including and especially the designs for the upgraded hydrophones Russia had purportedly used - while the secondary team lead by Bruno would conduct physical sabotage of the cables linking the post to the hydrophone network.

Hayes was hovering over Montgomery as the younger man made minute adjustments to the controls, all nonessential lights off in the control room. The listening post was located in an underwater base accessible only by submarine; intelligence suggested that the Russians relied on its secrecy and inaccessibility over more active defenses, but at this range and relying totally on passive monitoring systems it was mostly guesswork and prayer that they didn’t find another sub the very hard way.

Finally the man exhaled sharply and pulled the throttle all the way back to idle. “That’s it.” The words ricocheted around the interior of the craft and everyone tensed for a brief moment. Hayes looked ready for murder for a second, before giving a curt nod to Woodbridge. Woodbridge, in his turn, wasted no time in shimmying up the ladder and cracking the hatch less than an inch. When that produced no audible reaction, he eased it open the rest of the way and climbed out, the rest of his squad following him in short order.

Bruno assembled his own men at the base of the ladder as Lawson’s feet disappeared off the ladder and out of sight; Woodbridge’s group had much further to go, and they’d decided on a twenty-minute delay between each group to decrease chances of the larger combined group being discovered before any objectives could be accomplished. Weber fidgeted as the twenty minutes dragged slowly by, his restless fingers patting down various pockets and pouches as if to make sure he hadn’t forgotten anything, then starting again from the top when he’d checked the last of the pockets he could reach without bending over. Bruno let it go; as far as tics went, it wasn’t a bad one and Weber hadn’t had the easiest time of it since Tunstall had been given his discharge.

The chronometer on the wall ticked over and Hayes gave them the nod. Bruno went up the ladder first, the rubber soles of his boots making as little noise as he could manage on the metal rungs. Poking his head out of the hatch showed him that Montgomery - in a feat of skill Bruno wouldn’t have believed possible - had managed to snuggle them dangerously close to a hulking behemoth of a Russian sub, shielding them largely from view of the buzzing electrical lights above the wharf section of the base; the other side was a sheer wall, which meant they were practically invisible.

Bruno hauled himself out of the hatch and slipped into the water as quietly as he could; the cold concrete walls amplified every noise and echoed them endlessly, though at this point the only noises were the quiet bootfalls and occasional Russian phrases exchanged by the bored guards of the late shift. Bruno treaded water as the rest of his team slipped out of the hatch and into the water one by one; Montgomery had only brought the hatch itself a few inches above water, to keep the profile of both Marines and sub as small as he could. As soon as Bruno’s team was away he’d sink to the floor for four hours before resurfacing to pick them back up and get the hell outta dodge.

Estrada was the last one out of the hatch, and he closed it with a soft clunk before tightening the wheel to secure it. Sliding off the hull, he joined the rest of them in the water and Bruno took point as the struck out for the least-lit section of wharf they could see. Behind them, the sub they’d come in on dropped below the surface of the water with barely a ripple; they had four hours on the clock to reach the hydrophone cables, disable them, and return, or they’d have to find their own ride out and as much as Bruno knew Graves would have been delighted to steal a Russian submarine, he himself would prefer if everything went according to plan and they took their own sub home.

The pair of boots hanging over the edge of the dock itself and belonging to a very unconscious Russian soldier were a pretty decent indicator that Woodbridge had also landed here and as Bruno poked his head cautiously above the level the trail of dripped water not fully disguised by extant puddles sealed it - though the trail was only obvious from a certain angle. He hauled himself up onto the edge as quietly as he could, keeping a sharp ear out for footfalls even as he reached back down to pull Doughty out of the water. Doughty turned and grabbed Rowland while Bruno snagged Weber and pulled him out. Estrada was the last one up, and Bruno gave Rowland the nod as soon as Estrada was out. Rowland nodded back and darted away quickly, following the wet trail Woodbridge’s team had already left.

Fortunately Woodbridge had cleared out most of the guards between the water and the door to the rest of the base; Bruno’s squad was able to get through the door with relative ease and an absolute minimum of time wasted. Once through, the base was like many others Bruno had been tasked to infiltrate over the years. Whitewashed concrete walls and stark fluorescent lighting made shadows stretch ahead as well as behind and doors set flat with no inset made for nerve-wracking progress as they traversed towards their target. Fortunately, this base being more military than KGB meant that everything was labeled. The schematics provided had been rather sketchy on details, but following signs for Electrical Maintenance seemed like a good bet.

Electrical Maintenance was not a good bet. Electrical Maintenance was a dead end with too many guards for comfort; while they’d managed to prevent the alarm from being raised immediately, someone was going to find the bodies they’d stashed in the janitorial closet sooner rather than later and then they’d really be in trouble. Still, they had managed to find a map of the place and hadn’t fallen too far behind on their timeline; two hours in, two hours to go, and a better idea of their actual target location were gratifying in a way that six bodies distinctly weren’t. Their new target - Deep Sea Through Room - had been marked on the simplified floor plan as being recently redone, and in need of extra power couplings; with any luck, the hydrophone cabling would enter the base there.

It took another half-hour to find the correct hallway; the label on the door they wanted still read “Office 4B” and they wasted a further twenty minutes unlocking doors up and down the hallway before they found it. The room was dark and cold, but the retrofitting for the hydrophone wiring was extremely obvious. The wires themselves were thankfully not terribly large; none were larger around than Doughty’s thumb, and the shears they’d brought along were more than adequate for the task of getting through the tough material. The actual execution of their task took less than a handful of minutes; clipping the wires as close to the wall as they could ensured that the cables would have to be re-seated if they were to be mended at all.

With a little more than an hour left before Montgomery surfaced, Bruno’s team began heading back through the base towards the docking area. Bruno himself was wary; he’d seen too many operations where things went sloppy right before extraction and he’d rather avoid that in a base where the only exit was more than twenty fathoms down. They hadn’t seen hide nor hair of Woodbridge or his squad, either, and that was just a bit concerning; still, no alarms had been triggered which meant that whether they’d succeeded or not, they hadn’t been caught yet.

Their own march back was relatively quiet; one unfortunate two-man patrol nearly caught them in a cross-corridor, but Weber and Rowland managed to silence them before they could yell. Their bodies were dumped in a convenient bathroom; by the time they were discovered, the squad would be long gone. Without further interruptions and a little more than twenty minutes to spare, Bruno’s squad slipped through the door to the submarine area as quietly as they’d entered it. They were the first ones back, and all the patrols Woodbridge had cleared for them had been woken, from the looks of it. The sound of bootheels was hard against the water-slicked stone of the wharf and the Russian exchanges were a good deal less friendly; by the sound of it the two Woodbridge had dealt with had been thought to have fallen asleep on duty and were trying to make up for their mistakes.

Which was the last mistake they ever made.

Bruno’s knife slipped easily between the ribs of the first man as he turned the corner, hand up to catch the surprised shout and coughing as the man drowned in his own blood; Weber took the second with a quick jab to the base of the skull with his own Ka-bar. Both bodies were stashed out of sight behind loosely-stacked cargo containers that also served to conceal the squad. Bruno glanced around, a frown tugging at the corners of his mouth. Less than fifteen minutes to their ride out, and Woodbridge was still nowhere in sight. Bruno himself was disinclined to leave men behind, but Hayes had been exactingly clear about the timing; any longer, and they risked meeting another submarine slated to come into the base not too long after they were scheduled to leave. And by “meeting” he meant “accidentally ramming,” Montgomery had assured them later; the cheerful grin that had accompanied the statement was possibly more concerning than the statement itself, but the man was a good pilot.

With two minutes to go before the sub surfaced - and another body added to the pile at their feet - the door to the base slid open to reveal Lawson and Graham, followed closely by Hubbard and Ferguson, with Woodbridge himself bringing up the rear. Bruno nodded to them silently, waiting for Woodbridge’s acknowledging nod before fading back into the group. Now that the lieutenant was here, Bruno could concentrate on assessing both squads and keeping an eye on the water where the sub had come up before.

In point of fact, it was almost a yard further out than the last rise - Montgomery had likely figured out how close he actually was to the Russian submarine, no doubt - that started to show the tell-tale disturbance nearly three minutes later. None of them needed any urging to slide down off the quay and into the water; Rowland was the first man to make it to the hatch and in his haste pulled it open with a heavy clank. Everyone froze as the sound bounced back from the walls on the far side of the artificial bay, but after a long moment of silence Rowland slipped inside with barely a thunk. Hubbard was next, followed by Woodbridge, then Ferguson, Weber, Doughty, Graham, Lawson, Estrada, and lastly Bruno himself bringing up the rear and pulling the hatch gently closed behind him.

He turned, looked at the room full of men smelling strongly of sweat and seawater, and sighed internally.

It was going to be a long three days.


End file.
